Building with AI: Our Approach to Responsible Agentic Development in Open Source

The tech world has been building up towards the shift to a fully agentic development life cycle for a few years now. AI is changing how software gets built. Across the Puppet ecosystem, we're seeing a shift toward more agentic engineering workflows. AI helps generate code, shape documentation, and accelerate how Puppet modules evolve. This brings real benefits in speed and consistency, but it also raises important questions from the community: How are AI-generated changes validated? How do you ensure consistency across modules? What does this mean for contributors and maintainers? These are exactly the kinds of questions we should be asking! This article will outline how Perforce and the Puppet team are approaching the use of AI in our open source modules and repositories. How We Build Trust in AI-Assisted Contributions At Perforce, AI is a core part of our process and our teams operate within a defined, governed framework for development. We don’t rely on trust in the tool itself. We rely on the processes around it. Whether a change is written by a person, generated with AI, or some mix of both, they are held to the same standards before it’s accepted and released. In practice, that means: Human review is always the gate: Every change is reviewed by maintainers. AI can assist, but it doesn’t replace accountability. AI works within established patterns: AI-generated code isn’t created in isolation. It’s guided by the same module structures, conventions, and expectations that already exist across the ecosystem. Validation is continuous and enforced: AI doesn’t change our standards. It reinforces them. AI-generated changes go through the same checks as any other contribution: Test suites Integration validation Functional verification AI output is a starting point, not a final artifact: Generated code is iterated on, refined, and aligned before acceptance. We treat AI as an accelerator, not an authority. The community plays an important role Open source means visibilit